I know, I've been slacking
Entry posted by Rusty
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River Kennet, Weekend of 30th & 31st October 2010
I seem to have got a little behind with my blog, probably because I’m spending too much time fishing to write about it all so the next two entries will be out of sync I’m afraid.
Speen Moors 30th October
A gentle day out with Steve & Robbie, perch being the target species. Conditions were bright & sunny (not ideal then) and we didn’t fish either dawn or dusk so you could say that we didn’t give ourselves much of a chance. I’ve caught decent perch in less than ideal conditions before so I was still optimistic, particularly as the first hot spot produced an 8 oz example first cast. The optimism, however, gradually waned as no other stripeys were tempted from that particular swim, lots of small roach but not what I was after. I tried each of my ‘good swims’ in turn even enduring a slog through undergrowth to get to a canal swim that I hadn’t fished since March but my only reward was bramble cuts and exhaustion.
Steve wasn’t faring much better, he’d pitched up and had adopted the all or nothing approach, ledgered medusa head of lobs. A small jack took the bait but nothing else and after a while he decided to head off to Sunday’s venue for a recce. I stayed on and stubbornly refused to accept that I wasn’t going to succeed but after a couple more hours I too thought better of it and headed back to the car. One last try at the first swim produced a 3lb chub which was very nice but wasn’t a perch.
Speen continues to baffle
Colthrop/Aldershot 31st October
The day started in a confusing manner with neither of us having the vital key to secure access to Colthrop’s far bank (and also the Aldershot stretch). Steve had arrived before me and as the weirpool swims were taken headed off to another part of the Kennet in the belief that we couldn’t fish Colthrop at all. We were, in fact, able to fish a sidestream that I’d walked during the close season so a quick call and we met up again at Colthrop. We hadn’t fished these venues so it felt refreshing to try somewhere new. Steve again adopted the static approach in what looked like a very good swim on the sidestream, I chose to roam about. It’s only a short stretch but with lots of features it took a while to cover it. I bagged a perch of about a pound so the count had started…and then it stopped with no further activity in the next hour, not even tiddlers.
Although we couldn’t access Aldershot via the ‘official’ route I was sure there was another way in and a bit of map reading and wandering about soon disclosed it (I will be buying a key to the gate if any NAA members are reading this). What followed was a bit like discovering a long neglected garden, a venue which had clearly hosted matches in the past (evidenced by numbered pegs) but hadn’t seen an event for some time. Some pegs were clear but most weren’t accessible and getting bankside at all required lots of gardening. It was actually quite nice to see the venue in this way, I didn’t see anybody else and I doubt it’s fished much at all.
I walked the length of the stretch looking at likely spots and chose a peach of a trotting swim at the back end of an outside bend. The deep outside glide shallowed as the river widened & straightened and the river bed became gravelly, deep enough to be able to hold back and trot but not so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. It was probably too fast for chub but there was a large outside slack which might’ve held them if I could get the float in it. As it turned out that was too tricky for my trotting skills but I still thought it was worth spending time there.
That’s exactly what I did, spend a lot of time feeding & trotting with nothing to show for it. What seemed like hours later (a couple probably) the float dipped where it had previously sailed through a hundred times and lifting into it met with familiar resistance. It wasn’t a chub and once I saw the white belly I knew it was a barbel. That’s all I saw, after a couple of minutes coaxing it upstream the hook lost hold and that was that. I was very disappointed.
I’m never sure what to do in a ‘lost barbel’ swim. Do they shoal up and hang about or does the commotion spook them? I hadn’t pre-baited any other swims so I chose to stick it out in the hope that another would come along. Only half an hour later that’s exactly what happened. The fight was just as powerful to begin with but the barbel soon resorted to making itself big and using the flow, it may have been the same fish from earlier, perhaps a little knackered after its previous exertions. Steve called at that point, the static approach was only catching Signals so he was going to move on to Bulls Lock for a last hoorah on the canal. I carried on for a short while before deciding to head home having made a note to revisit this venue soon. No chub for me today and perhaps the barbel potential will drop off during the Winter but we’ll see.
As for Steve, well the Bulls Lock assault only resulted in more crayfish, had he taken his trap dinner tonight would’ve been quite spectacular.
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